e lustre of open love and sacred sacrifice. This I
afterwards learned was their wives' doing, and marvellous in my eyes. Ah
me! How many a decently apparelled husband, how many a white-robed
child, has come forth out of great tribulation not their own. Indeed,
uncounted multitudes there are who shall walk in white before the throne
of God, whose robes the secret sacrifice of loving hearts hath whitened
as no fuller of earth can whiten them.

My first meeting with the kirk session of St. Cuthbert's was an
epoch-marking incident. Twenty-eight there were who sat about the
session-room, every man but one an importation from Caledonia's rugged
hills. Roxburgh's covenanting heroes, Wigtonshire's triumphant martyrs,
Dumfriesshire and her Cameronians, with their great namesake's lion
heart; Ayrshire, with her bloody memories of moor and moss-hags, of
quarry and conventicle, of Laud and liberty--all these had filtered
through and reappeared in these silent and stalwart men.

Of these eight-and-twenty faces at least one score had the cast of
marble and the stamp of eternity upon them. I felt like a hillock
nestling at the feet of lofty peaks, for I do make my oath that when you
are begirt by men in whose veins there flows the blood of martyrs, who
have been slowly nurtured upon such stately doctrines as are their daily
food, who actually believe in God as a living participator in the
affairs of time, whose mental pabulum has been Thomas Boston and Samuel
Rutherford and Philip Doddridge, and who have used these worthies but as
helps to climb that unpinnacled hill of the Eternal Word--when you get
such men as these, multiplied a hundredfold by the stern consciousness
of a religious trust, if you are not then among the Rockies of flesh and
blood, I am as one who sees men like walking trees, ignorant of the true
altitudes of human life.

But I was yet to learn, and to learn by heart (the great medium of all
real character), that many a fragrant flower may bloom in secret clefts
of rock-bound hills, frowning and forbidding though they be. For God
loves to surprise us, especially in happy ways; and His is a sanguine
sun.

It should now be stated that I began my ministry in St. Cuthbert's with
the handicap of an Irish ancestry. How then was I to wear the hodden
gray? Or how was I to commingle myself with that historic tide which I
well knew the Scottish heart regarded as fed more than any other from
the river that makes glad the cit